When he was a kid in Denver, Jacques Bailly elucubrated.

This activity helped him win the national spelling bee in 1980. To capture the crown at age 14, Bailly correctly spelled the word elucubrate. (Look it up and beware: You might have to spell it without an e to find it in the dictionary.)

Bailly, 40, is an associate professor of classics at the University of Vermont. He means it when he says classics is the most useful major a student can have.

"Classicists out-perform every other major in medical school or law school," Bailly said. Through the study of Greek and Latin, classicists immerse themselves in language, of course, but also literature, history, culture, economics, philosophy and art.

At least once, a budding classicist out-performed scores of competitors at the annual Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee. The competition, founded in 1925, will begin this year May 31. Bailly, called the pronouncer, will be the person who tells the children what word they're required to spell.

If you're not one of the 275 kids who will be competing at this year's bee, you can catch Bailly's act in the recently released movie, "Akeelah and the Bee."

"It's very Hollywood," said Bailly, who saw it last weekend. In the movie, he plays himself: At the national competition, he gives the actor-spellers the word that he or she has to spell. Bailly was also a consultant, advising the filmmakers about various aspects of the competition. Laurence Fishburne, who stars in the movie and is one of its producers, grilled Bailly about spelling bees as he prepared for his role as an erstwhile college professor who coaches a young speller.

Bailly has a calm and clear voice. He's a precise speaker with a welcoming tone. He can read pronunciation symbols and derivation codes the way other people read letters or numbers: with immediate recognition and comprehension. He knows what information is useful to a speller and what's misleading or irrelevant. It is mostly confusing, for instance, to use "dropped-r" pronunciations, though the official bee dictionary indicates this pronunciation option. There's no point in saying "Ha-vad Ya-d" if a child is called upon to spell "Harvard Yard" (which he wouldn't be).

He needs to be accurate and wants to be generous. "I would love to tell the kids how to spell the word," he said. "I want them all to spell right."

"Spelling is weird," said Bailly, who does not associate it with intelligence. "It's a visual memory thing. For some people, it's tactile memory. It's not analysis, and it's not critical thinking."

In Bailly's spelling heyday, the study method involved memorizing lists of words. He and his mother, who helped him study, found in his last year of competition -- the season that ended with the national title -- a preferable method. This involves looking for and recognizing spelling patterns and understanding connections between words. It means learning about etymology, derivation, parts of speech, and finding smaller words, language patterns and roots, in larger words.

There's a scene in the movie where the character played by Fishburne teaches the girl this way of thinking about words. He uses the word soliterraneous to make his point, asking her to concentrate on its first three letters and to use her understanding of that root to think about and learn the unfamiliar word.

"I almost kissed (director) Doug Atchinson for putting that in there," Bailly said. "That is the best way to study for a spelling bee: Taking apart words and seeing their roots and their history and their connection to other words."

At some point, inevitably, a competitive speller is going to be given a word he doesn't know. If he's done nothing but memorize words, the competitor is going to be in trouble. If he has strategies to employ, looking for patterns and roots, he's got an advantage and a shot at spelling the word correctly.

"It'll be a puzzle, and you can make an educated guess," Bailly said. "It doesn't mean you'll get it right, but it's so much more important than memorizing words. ... In some ways, I'm on a mission with the bee. To try to get people to see spelling as part of a whole." One that takes in meanings, origins and connections to other words.

Bailly said he is a "much worse" speller than he was 25 years ago. This is because he isn't elucubrating with a dictionary every night. It also has to do with brain function, he said.

"In the movie, Larabee (Fishburne) says: 'Your brain is sponge,'" Bailly recalled. "He's absolutely right. Those kids are sponges. We need to feed them."

He laments the fact that the movie's star speller, Akeelah, is called a "brainiac" and teased for excelling in an academic pursuit, noting that jocks are not derided for athletic excellence. And he believes it's unfortunate that U.S. educators sometimes frown on competition.

"Competition is very, very good," Bailly said. "It helps people achieve excellence."

Bailly's interest in words took off in fifth grade, when a teacher introduced him to etymology. His interest grew in high school, fired by a 6-foot-tall nun who taught him Latin. "It was very inspirational," he said.

At Brown, he majored in classics, opting not to double major in physics because the physics classes were early in the morning. He recognizes this as a dubious and "irresponsible" reason for ditching physics, but such is college life. He stuck with his classics courses, and in his junior year, starting to think about careers, Bailly looked around campus and decided professors had a pretty nice life. So he applied for a Fulbright to a university in Switzerland, where he studied philology. (Look it up; kid-spellers studying the right way ought to be able to figure out at least one meaning.) He came back to the states and graduate school at Cornell, where he earned his Ph.D. in ancient philosophy.

"I am more astonished that I can read Plato and understand him across 2,500 years," Bailly said, "than I am skeptical that I can understand him."

Bailly, whose father's family is French, speaks English, French and German. He reads Greek and Latin, languages he teaches at UVM.

During three days of filming last spring in Los Angeles, Bailly used his moviemaking down time to work on his spelling bee duties: studying lists of words, noting linguistic symbols, considering parts of speech and derivations.

Though there was "talent coming out of the woodwork" for the role of pronouncer, Bailly senses the moviemakers saw in him somebody who understands well what spelling bees are. "It's kind of arcane," he said, "what they kids are looking for when they ask questions about the words."

To check Bailly's screen presence, the producers only had to view the real-life competition on ESPN. Bailly will preside over the national bee again in a few weeks. It's an event he finds inspirational, where selection is based on meritocracy and where he delights in watching kids of diverse ethnicity, culture, race and economic background excel.

"We have a national phobia of intellectual elitism," Bailly said. "I am sick of it. We have to encourage intellectual elitism."